Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

EVENTS

Oath Keepers Preparing for War?

The Oath Keepers have always scared me. I certainly don’t object to military personnel, law enforcement and others taking a pledge not to follow orders that are unconstitutional or tyrannical. That should be a given for everyone. But it’s been obvious from the beginning that these guys are John Birch-style wingnuts preparing for what they believe is an inevitable war with the government. And now they say they’re “going operational.”

Oath Keepers is instructing its 30,000 members nation-wide to form up special teams and sub-teams in each Oath Keepers chapter, at the town and county level, modeled loosely on the Special Forces “A Team” (Operational Detachment A ) model, and for a similar purpose: to be both a potential operational unit for community security and support during crisis, but also, as mission #1, to serve as training and leadership cadre, to assist in organizing neighborhood watches, organizing veterans halls to provide community civil defense, forming County Sheriff Posses, strengthening existing CERT, volunteer fire, search-and-rescue, reserve deputy systems, etc., and eventually to assist in forming and training town and county militias (established by official act of town and county elected representatives). We want our chapters to organize themselves as a working model that we can then take to other veterans organizations, such as the VFW, American Legion, Marine Corps League, etc. in each town and help them establish such teams within their already existing veterans halls. And likewise, to serve as a model and training cadre to help churches, neighborhood watches, and any other civic organization organize.

We are basing this on the Special Forces model, which has a twelve man “A team” of specially trained soldiers who are inserted into a community to train and lead that community in resistance to oppressive regimes (hence their motto: “De Oppresso Liber). SF’s primary mission is to teach, organize, and lead, rather than to directly fight. They can fight, of course, but they are most dangerous as a force-multiplier by helping an entire community to fight. We will do the same – be force multipliers to help prepare communities so they can preserve civilization by providing their own security, disaster relief, infrastructure preservation, emergency communications, strategic food reserve, and medical care.

Having volunteers ready and organized to help with natural disaster relief and such sounds just fine. But that isn’t what this is really about. This is about standard-issue right wing paranoia:

In addition to this being part of our mission anyway, we feel like we are flat running out of time and we need to get as prepared as possible as fast as possible. The Oath Keepers national Board of Directors war-gamed what we think is the most likely move by our enemies to scrap the Constitution. On the BOD at the time were a Special Forces Major, an Army Ranger, and a Marine Scout-sniper veteran, as well as a retired Navy Commander and several Vietnam combat vets, and several other combat arms veterans. Playing devil’s advocate, and putting themselves in the enemy’s shoes, we estimated that the most effective course for “them” to follow would be to:

1. Intentionally trigger a catastrophic economic collapse as an economic “neutron bomb” (kills the people, but leaves the land intact). With the current intentional lack of a Strategic Grain Reserve, our population is in a strategic “checkmate” position where an economic collapse could be a near-extinction event for our population. During the Cold War, the U.S. government maintained three years worth of grain in a Strategic Grain Reserve for the entire US population because they knew that in the wake of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, it could take three years to recover and grow crops again. Without that reserve, those who survived the exchange would starve to death before they could possibly restart growing enough food. We now have no such Strategic food reserve, which means that any catastrophic interruption in food delivery could kill millions of Americans. Such a disruption could occur because of even a limited nuclear exchange, an EMP strike (either man-made, or natural, as a result of solar activity), or, an economic collapse.

Currently, our economy is in such a weak state that an economic collapse could be intentionally triggered at any time. Because of the lack of a food reserve, and because few Americans store food on their own, such a collapse would lead to mass starvation, just like in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange.

The US government is spending billions of dollars on ammunition, armored vehicles, and weapons for DHS and local police. It is spending nothing on food for the people. They are preparing to control and contain us, and to shoot us, but not preparing to feed us. Why is that? You know the answer.

2. Let the country descend into chaos. A national economic collapse would be like a “national Katrina” but lasting far longer, and because it is nation-wide, it would be far more intense. The cities would implode. All the government would have to do is contain them and let them implode. in the midst of that chaos, they could also do a decapitation strike on the leaders of the liberty movement, but other than that, “They” could just sit back and wait a month, two months, or three to be really sure the people are at a maximum level of starvation, weakness, and chaos, and then:

3. Ride in like the cavalry, to “save” us by means of martial law and scrapping our constitution once-and-for all. They could blame the collapse on the so-called “free market” and on not having enough government power, and they could blame delays in relief on the “extremists” in the patriot movement (i.e. “we would have gotten the food trucks in sooner, but the extremists were ambushing our safety check-points and resisting the necessary relocation to relief camps”). Their ready to go solution would be a world-wide version of the Fed, and scrapping what’s left of the Constitution. People would be told to “just turn in your guns, and you’ll get food” and “just turn in the extremists, and you’ll get food.”

ADDITIONAL ANALYSIS: To the above, we now add Brandon Smith’s insight that with a war in Syria, the elites can trigger an economic collapse with a war – with Russia and China using economics as a weapon in retaliation. All China would have to do is dump US treasuries and refuse to trade with US dollars. That would begin the final death-spiral of the dollar.

The Chinese would be blamed for the collapse, rather than the banksters. “They” would tell the American people that the evil Chinese are to blame for the death of the dollar, and anyone who resists the “emergency measures” by the US government would be accused of aiding the enemy. They would say “domestic extremists took advantage of the Chinese economic attack on us to push their own racist and extremist anti-government agenda, making the collapse worse by attacking peace-keepers and international relief volunteers, and by attacking and resisting US officials who were trying to restore law and order.”

It is because of the systemic weakness of the American people, and our strategic checkmate position of having no strategic food storage and no effective local security, that we feel the need to take Oath Keepers operational and put our focus on each chapter being a training cadre to get their communities as prepared and organized as possible in whatever time we have left.

We urge you to presume the worst in the short term, and to work in three or four month sprints – assume that a collapse will be triggered this fall/winter and do all you can to get yourselves and your communities ready.

If it doesn’t happen in the next four months, then do another sprint, of three or four more months of preparation. And keep going until it happens – which it will eventually, no matter what anyone does. The dollar is doomed.

It’s not a coincidence that the founder of this group used to be a Ron Paul staffer. This is typical John Birch Society paranoia, the same thing they’ve been predicting every year for the last 5 decades, maybe more. And they scare the shit out of me.

Comments

the same thing they’ve been predicting every year for the last 5 decades, maybe more.

And these right wing chumps (and survivalist types) always buy it. They remind me of the fictitious animal known as the woodchump. It lives in the woods and is a chump. All of the woodchumps can be fooled all of the time.

30,000 paranoid loons in a country of 316 million isn’t much, a rounding error. And what they wrote that EB quoted is just gibberish.

The US government is spending billions of dollars on ammunition, armored vehicles, and weapons for DHS and local police. It is spending nothing on food for the people. They are preparing to control and contain us, and to shoot us, but not preparing to feed us.

, but not preparing to feed us.. Gibberish. These are the same people who complain that 47 million people are on food stamps. And keep trying to cut…food stamps. And what does FEMA do?

The loons loved it. They could stockpile food, ammo, and guns in their rural hideouts and wait for the coming disaster. And many of them did exactly that.

The rest of us just sat around on New Years and partied or watched TV with a bottle of champagne. And then went to bed. Nothing happened.

PS One of the reasons why their was no Y2K crisis is because people saw it coming. A huge number of people fixed our computer systems so that they wouldn’t crash when the year rolled over. Humans are capable of sometimes identifying future problems and fixing them before they occur.

One of my pet peeves is that Y2K seems to be the standard, “but you said it was dangerous and nothing happened! Therefore is just alarmism!

Yeah, I was heavily involved in revamping the systems for the company I worked for to handle the year 2000, along with overseeing the efforts of our supply base. A lot of hours and weeks spent away from home went into that project, where the tech sector’s supply chains would have crashed if people hadn’t proactively worked on this effort.

A good example was the inability of many material requirement planning systems (“MRP”) to generate demand and therefore orders for materials beyond 2000. Factories would have been left with no orders for their products along with not having a sufficient set of parts on order to build their products even if they had received orders upstream.

Since so many of these vulnerable systems were written in COBOL, it seemed to me to be the last hurrah for those programmers who never updated their skills to more modern programming languages. I’m not sure what happened to all these people after we were done; I sincerely wish them well.

I’ve always seen the Y2K-deniers as analogous to those who successfully obstruct mitigation of AGW because they deny what science understands regarding climate change. It’s my observation these two sets of deniers shared the same character defects, especially their determined ignorance of the premises that require understanding in order to appreciate the challenges both present and the cost/benefit of acting.

PS One of the reasons why their was no Y2K crisis is because people saw it coming. A huge number of people fixed our computer systems so that they wouldn’t crash when the year rolled over. Humans are capable of sometimes identifying future problems and fixing them before they occur.

Even better this was something that was known (at least in the financial industry) from around 1970 onwards. One of the reasons there weren’t as many systems that were vulnerable as the doomsayers were predicting, though there was a bump in code reviews just to make sure.

Interestingly, this “trigger economic collapse, let chaos descend, ride in as cavalry” looks remarkably plausible for a Tea Party plan.

Oddly enough, this crisis is entirely human caused by the Tea Party. The ones that caused our last crisis, the Great Recession.

1. Obama has been successful at fixing the Bush Catastrophe. The deficit is half what it was a few years ago. Employment is up, the housing market has recovered, the economy is growing a little, the Dow has set a record. We are out of Iraq, Afghanistan is winding dowm, bin Laden is dead, Al Qaeda is on the run.

Even my Zombie 401(K) plan is back from the dead, at least temporarily.

Really, things are getting better and were a lot worse just a few years ago.

2. And all the Tea Party can do is threaten to wreck everything. And it is possible that they might do exactly that. I simply don’t understand national suicide as a viable electoral strategy but it worked for them well enough.

Actually…there IS a community based (*civilian*) training and organization system for sealing with natural disasters. If you’re interested, ask your local fire department about CERT (Community Emergency Response Training). The full course runs about 20 to 30 hours (spread over several weeks) and not only trains you in what to do to pick up the pieces after disaster strikes, but–more importantly–what *not* to do. It also trains in how to integrate your efforts into official disaster response when that gets rolling.

If the Tea Party lunatics in congress actually trigger worldwide economic catastrophe, the Oath Keepers will blame it on the negroes and jackbooted liberals, led by Libero-Muslim Negro-in-Chief Obama. Meantime, they’re among the Americans egging on the potentially catastrophic decisions in congress, while also arming themselves to the teeth and forming paramilitary groups. It doesn’t help that they’re backed in this by a wingnut chorus that has seized control of spineless congressional Republicans who are behaving as if they’re helpless to stop the economic catastrophe that will happen if they don’t put a stop to the madness of some 32 lunatics on their side of the aisle.

But back to the Oath Keepers role in all of this. It’s as if they’re actually rooting for a situation that’s ripe for martial law and the FEMA camps of their fevered, collective imagination. But this is what paranoid people do; First, they project their own aggression. Then they react fearfully to the “enemy.” Their fear requires them to react defensively with more aggression, eventually provoking others into aggression. Then, when the targets of the projection react with aggression, they feel further confirmed that they’re under malevolent attack.

In the worst scenarios, they create an escalating, vicious circle of projection and provocation in which others escalate in conformity with their escalating projections. When its an individual, he gets locked up, or he starts killing people at the Navy Yard, provoking an armed response. Or he becomes the delusional, heavily-armed crackpot cornered in his compound with his wives and offspring. With Oath Keepers, there are 30,000 potential Navy Yard killers ready to launch an organized attack on “the enemy.”

Interesting, that many people insist that the authorities should have intervened before the Navy Yard killer showed up at work with guns blazing. They argue that he was legally insane and that should have been grounds for locking him up. And with the Oath Keepers, we have a group of some 30,000 paranoid people waving guns and threatening to turn the US into a gigantic D.C. Navy Yard, with the rest of us cowering for cover. Taking that step to lock them all up isn’t something we want to do, because it would amount to wholesale suspension of civil rights–an effective declaration of martial law. But this seems to be exactly what these Oath Keepers are trying to provoke.

With respect to the aspect of rooting for martial law and FEMA camps, I see this these fantasies as expressions of unconscious wishes to halt and contain the frightening escalation of their own aggression. Intrinsic to paranoia, the blame lies with The Other, but they know unconsciously that resolution requires containment of their own escalating aggression. So while martial law and prison-reeducation-camp fantasies are their consciously declared fears, these fantasies also represent unconscious pleas to the authorities: lock me up and reeducate me, i.e., give me therapy. It’s psychologically comparable to the Navy Yard killer turning up at emergency rooms and contacting the police about his delusions, or it’s similar to a psychotic serial killer’s public plea in a letter or call to a newspaper: someone please stop me before I kill again.

It is because of the systemic weakness of the American people, and our strategic checkmate position of having no strategic food storage and no effective local security,

and no effective local security,

More gibberish.

In my area, we have the local city police, the county sherrif, the state police, the National Guard, a few nearby military bases, the FBI, and DHS. Paid for by our taxes and they keep order well enough. Nobody with any wits messes with them and the witless end up in jail or dead.

1) “Playing devil’s advocate” – no, if you really had someone playing devil’s advocate, they wouldn’t be saying “here’s how FEMA will deploy the black helicopters”, they’d be saying “what is wrong with you paranoid freaks?!? What you are saying makes no sense at all.”

2) “Why is that? You know the answer.” OMG, you’re right! I do indeed know the answer! How about that.

The US government is spending billions of dollars on ammunition, armored vehicles, and weapons for DHS and local police. It is spending nothing on food for the people.

They sound like disgruntled former veterans who, for one reason or another, couldn’t get jobs with DHS or their local police departments. Thus, to them, DHS and local police are staffed with people who would join the “bad side” during the collapse. But “neighborhood watches, . . . community civil defense, . . . County Sheriff Posses, . . . CERT, volunteer fire, search-and-rescue, reserve deputy systems, . . . town and county militias, . . . veterans organizations, such as the VFW, American Legion, Marine Corps League, . . . churches, . . . and any other civic organization[s]” would only be staffed with the people who would join the “good side”. Maybe its because they don’t run background checks to make sure you’re not batshit crazy?

By the way, if it would help ease their paranoia, we could always spend less on ammunition, armored vehicles, and weapons, and more on food for the people. That’s what liberals have always advocated, but if we can get the right-wing on board just by changing up the language, I’m okay with that. So instead of advocating for “feeding the poor”, we should advocate “preventing the government from starving us and using weapons against us in our weakened condition”.

All China would have to do is dump US treasuries and refuse to trade with US dollars.

Of course! Refusing to trade in the currency they received from the treasuries! That wouldn’t hurt China’s interdependent economy at all!

All China would have to do is dump US treasuries and refuse to trade with US dollars.

Of course! Refusing to trade in the currency they received from the treasuries! That wouldn’t hurt China’s interdependent economy at all!

More gibberish.

That sound you here in the background is 1.3 billion Chinese, suddenly broke and rioting over scarce food supplies.

If they didn’t sell us manufactured goods for dollars, they wouldn’t be able to import oil and food. We OTOH, could always make more stuff, it would just cost a little more for a computer or smart phone.

With the current intentional lack of a Strategic Grain Reserve, our population is in a strategic “checkmate” position where an economic collapse could be a near-extinction event for our population.

The “Oath Keepers” are correct in asserting that there is an “intentional lack of a Strategic Grain Reserve” in the USA; the WTO rules on agriculture discourage, although they do not forbid, the operation of such state-managed reserves. What reserves there are, are controlled by agribusiness corporations. most notably Cargill – these corporations played a large part in writing the rules which have encouraged the current situation, where unbridled speculation in food commodities pushes up prices, to their advantage. In the event of a financial collapse, however, it would be distribution and not reserves that would be the choke point: the companies that trade and transport food, like most others, rely on constant access to credit.

We OTOH, could always make more stuff, it would just cost a little more for a computer or smart phone.

Over time, yes. In the short term, no.

For one, we disassembled a lot of production. Some of it we shipped to China, some just went to scrap.

For another, China has acquired some essential material monopolies. Rare earth, for instance, that are needed for everything from LCDs to the magnets in disk drives. We used to do that, but they undercut our prices and bought the equipment. It will take quite a while to build back our production capacity.

I spent most of my Army career in SF (primarily 10th Group) and all I can say is these guys are complete nutbars and quite the opposite of the type of soldier you find on an ODA. If anything, they sound like the wannabe legs you learn have spent most of their time in the National Guard, never really having done anything, never really personally motivated to actually do anything of consequence, yet they feel “cool by association” because technically they’re in the same Army.

It may be an oversight, but they left out the part about the government breeding an army of extraterrestrials with superhuman powers at Area 51 who will use ESP to ferret out and destroy patriots with mind control

Yeah, their theory that there’s a conspiracy to drag the US into a ground war in Syria is much crazier than the theory propounded by multiple posters here that there’s a conspiracy to drag the US into a ground war in Syria.

We want our chapters to organize themselves as a working model that we can then take to other veterans organizations, such as the VFW, American Legion, Marine Corps League, etc. in each town and help them establish such teams within their already existing veterans halls

Speaking as a member of the Legion and the Marine Corps League, these guys are going to get absolutely nowhere, fast, with legitimate chartered veterans’ organizations.

It’s too bad that the relatively few kooks make it sound as though we’re all knuckle-dragging idjits.

According to Google TranslateDe Oppresso Liber = ‘book of the oppressed’*.

Looks like Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith mangled his Latin.
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Dingo Cunctator
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* I think they might mean Ad oppresso, libertas (‘to the oppressed, freedom’) , or perhaps Liberiores oppresso (‘f’reer of the oppressed’), but what would you expect from a bunch of Carthaginian wannabes?

These guys seem scary enough, but any real “action” on their part will probably never be more than a few isolated nuts falling outta their tree… and the Oath Keepers will deny that these nuts were ever part of their little cult.

I try to take comfort in the fact that most, if not all of them are Authoritarian Followers without a powerful, charismatic Authoritarian Leader to follow. Followers rarely act on their own, they need strict hierarchy, rules, and a hard-assed leader to tell them what to do, and when. In other words, these guys have enough hate, but they won’t find the will to act until some very clever sociopath (think Charlie Manson with a buzz-cut and a uniform) takes control of the organization, with the members’ willing approval.

I don’t think they have a leader (yet) that the Oath Keepers would follow into battle against the US military (still the most fearsome killing machine in human history) who will still defend the government, despite the O.K.’s delusions. When it comes to clever rightwing sociopaths, the well-paid professions in politics, corporate lobbying and media punditry is far more appealing than being a cult leader for a bunch of trigger-happy wingnuts.

According to Google Translate
De Oppresso Liber = ‘book of the oppressed’*.

Looks like Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith mangled his Latin.

So did Google Translate. Spending a few minutes checking things over with Lewis and Short and other sources, it’s more accurately rendered “Book on that which was subdued” or “was overthrown.” Singular “that”. Book of the Oppressed (plural, because we’re talking about oppressed people) should be Liber Oppressorum. Totally different construction. “De” is only “of” in the sense of “of $PLACE,” like “Mr. John Smith of New York City”. When it’s a topic, it’s “on” or “concerning”. And the connotations of “oppressum” are entirely wrong. There are words in Latin that mean oppressed in the modern sense, but “oppressum” is not one. Literally “pressed down,” also overthrown or subdued, but not oppressed.

Totally irrelevant to the larger conversation. Trying to brush up on my Latin, though.

oranje“@20: I live in the UP of Michigan, get the CBC on television and radio, and can mock Stephen Harper with the best of them. Will you consider adopting our peninsula?”
We can take your people. We can’t adopt the peninsula, though, as peninsula adoption is specifically banned in our Canadian constitution, the Constitution of Canada/La Constitutement du Canad.
If you’re willing to move to an archipelago, we can adopt that. According to the Constitution of Canada/La Constitutement du Canad, we have to. Then we have to drag the islands to Canada and moosh them up against it.
It should be noted that the Founding Fathers of Canada/Les Peres de Founder du Canad were very, very drunk when they wrote the Constitution of Canada/La Constitutement du Canad.

And also that’s not French. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not French. It looks French. It sounds French. But it’s not French.

I admit Oathkeepers.org has a high motivation in patriotism and a sincere desire to defend the Constitution. However they discriminate and do not allow all citizens to join equally within their radical militant group, or without paying membership fees to do so.

Oathkeepers.org primarily recruits and only allows people with former and current government authority to join with full membership, and everyone else are considered associate members. To be in compliance with the Constitution, militias must be essentially local and independent of established authorities, since they may have to challenge or bypass those authorities if they abuse their authority or fail to perform their lawful duties.

Furthermore, groups not open to full public membership and/or which are organized for any other purposes are not militias in accordance to the Constitution of the United States. Groups not open to public membership and/or which are organized for any other purposes are not militias. Therefore Oathkeepers.org and their members do not fully comply with the Constitution and are an unlawful radical militant group.

The true nature and purpose of a citizen militia is defensive and concerns itself with the preservation of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. As such, a real Militia is regarded as serious and ever vigilant, but they are not militant.

However there are individuals or groups such as ‘OathKeepers.org’ that are determined to be engaged in combat and are aggressively active. These individuals or groups are not militias they are militant.

We must remember our founding fathers insisted on a distinction between the “genuine” Militia and a “select” militia, which they viewed as a danger, just as much a danger as a standing army. They did not want a militia whose members might consist of anything less than the entire people, or at least able-bodied ones in a certain age range, because if selected on any other basis, they might be used to oppress other parts of the population. In this case our founding fathers would clearly consider Oathkeepers to be a “select” militia when 100% of the group with full membership are former military and police, not to count a few civilians who never served and are considered associate members.

To say it more simply, Oathkeepers would be a legally sanctioned “genuine” militia in accordance with the Constitution if they fully complied with the Constitution. Instead they are an unlawful radical militant group outside of the Constitution, and what our founding fathers would clearly call a “select” militia.

madgastronomer – thank-you Claudius old bean, time for your nap now.
Dingo Cunctator
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PS Nouns that are collections of things are generally treated as singular:
“The voice of the people” rather than “the voices of the people”